Crabs in the grey cup: Baltimore's Canadian football Sojourn, 1994–95

Abstract

During the early 1990s, Baltimore had a problem: replacing its professional football team, which moved to Indiana in 1984. Fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs plotted, begged, and spent millions trying to gain a replacement. But the National Football League was diffident. With scads of ardent civic suitors, the NFL played hard-to-get. By 1994, Baltimore remained on the outside, feeling desperate. At the same time, North America's “other” professional football operation, the Canadian Football League, faced troubles, too. Older than the more high-profile NFL, the CFL lagged behind its media-savvy American counterpart. Across Canada, the CFL discerned disturbing signs of ennui in its fan base. The solution came suddenly: expand the CFL into the United States, injecting elements of nationalistic competition into the staid league, and granting pigskin-hungry American cities teams to call their own. What followed was a brief, bizarre, and culturally significant episode pin North American sport history. The CFL added five American franchises, while fretting that its distinctively Canadian identity might dilute or evaporate. Most American franchises met scant fan approval. Only in Baltimore did the experiment succeed, because there singular conditions brewed a blend of civic parochialism matching Canadian nationalism.